41–50 of 71 posts
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
i knew a trans person whose preferred pronoun was 'it'. i just used its first name.
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I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story. So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly ref…
But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.
Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.
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Even if you know what gender the person is it's not uncommon to use they "Well officer, I saw them walk from their car up to the door then they turned and looked around, that's when I saw them pull the ski mask down, draw their gun and enter the bank" --- Manager: What was the customer doing when you told them to leave? Clerk: Well I had been trying to help them with their project but they kept stepping into my perso…
It would depend on context, if you ask me. The bank robbery was across the street & half a block down? Completely unremarkable to say "they". The clerk is complaining about sexual harassment, hand on thigh? Avoiding "he" implies a careful choice not to say, either to hide an identity, or because the customer was obviously confusingly gender-ambiguous.
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True, which is why it needs to start with people choosing to be called ‘it’. It's yet to happen, but I'll do my bit if/when I'm ever asked for my preferred pronouns. Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).
I have encountered a few people who use it/its pronouns.
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This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races. It's a linguistic quirk of English…
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.
My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.
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For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0] Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring…
The well-known mathematician M Spivak is amoung those who has suggested 'e' (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun ). Somehow the deliberate proposals often seem not to succeed.
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It would depend on context, if you ask me. The bank robbery was across the street & half a block down? Completely unremarkable to say "they". The clerk is complaining about sexual harassment, hand on thigh? Avoiding "he" implies a careful choice not to say, either to hide an identity, or because the customer was obviously confusingly gender-ambiguous.
I interpreted “they” in the second one as implying distance from the person in question, like the speaker wants nothing to do with them and is emphasising that they were a stranger. Possibly part of why saying “they” feels uncomfortable to people, but I’d never realised it until reading that example.
It's so nice to learn that back then, as now, trans people at some point in their live transitioned and then tried to live out their lives as the other gender, and were successful at it. Some only being found out after death or by becoming really ill. Luckily we're more open about it now. Also, now, as back then, most trans people just want to fit in and not be labeled 'other', or 'trans' for that matter.
But yes, it is also useful to be able to abandon those labels altogether, or not have them define one's identity.
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
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I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races. It's a linguistic quirk of English…
You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm... In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit. My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including…